User talk:Browncoat
New horizons Hi, welcome to your new wiki! I'm excited to see how this gets set up. Leave a message on my talk page if I can help with anything! -- Danny (talk) 22:32, 7 June 2007 (UTC) :Yep, give a piece of that sky to me too! Great start here -- don't hesitate to ask if there's anything I can do to help. — Catherine o' the ComTeam 03:04, 8 June 2007 (UTC) ::Oh, by the way -- since the main page has been moved to Browncoat Wiki, there's one thing that needs to get changed that I can't do -- MediaWiki:Mainpage should say Browncoat Wiki instead of Main Page. (Only the admins can edit MediaWiki pages.) ::Once that's done, then hitting Main Page on the sidebar won't get the "Redirected from Main Page" thing. -- Danny (talk) 12:49, 8 June 2007 (UTC) Change to brown background I've changed monobook for you -- use CTRL-F5 to force your browser to reload the stylesheet so you can see the changes. For code for changing the color of the links and the menus, see http://house.wikia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.css or http://eq2.wikia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Monobook.css -- these are pretty heavily customized and might give you some ideas. Also, you can sign and date your posts on talk pages by adding four tildes (~~~~) at the end -- makes it easier for others to know who they're talking to, and to reply. :) — Catherine o' the ComTeam 17:23, 8 June 2007 (UTC) :Oops.. sorry, I knew that - but I tend to be a bit forgetful. Thanks for the help with the colors ;) -- Cheryl 17:25, 8 June 2007 (UTC) Skins You've done a great job with the look of this wiki so far! I realized, re-reading what I said yesterday, that it sounded a little abrupt -- sorry about that! :) You seem very capable, so I hope that pointing you at examples was what you were looking for. Please don't hesitate to ask if you need more specific help with anything. As far as changing the default view to Monobook for everyone, I'm afraid it's not possible right now. You've caught us in the middle of a transition -- the Slate skin, or its lighter sister Smoke, are soon going to be the default skin for all Wikia wikis, and we feel they will provide many great new features. I will be happy to switch your default to Smoke if you like that better -- see Wikia:Newskin for screenshots, or try it in your preferences. (Of course logged-in users will always be able to choose Monobook for their own display.) We are still updating the Slate/Smoke skin in response to user feedback, so if there's anything in particular that you would like to see improved, please leave a comment at http://inside.wikia.com/forum/ . When we are finished upgrading the skin, admins will be able to do more to customize its colors and look; we just can't make the tools available until the design is more stable. I'm sorry for the temporary inconvenience! If there are any customizations you'd like to make to the content area, which is not affected by the new skin, you can move them to MediaWiki:Common.css instead of MediaWiki:Monobook.css -- changes made here will be displayed for users of all skins. I hope that helps! — Catherine o' the ComTeam 16:47, 9 June 2007 (UTC) :Don't worry about yesterday... I didn't think you were abrupt at all. You've been absolutely wonderful so far, and we're thrilled to have you on our team!! =) As for what you've said about skins, that explains a lot, so thanks for that. We definitely want to take you up on the offer to change to the default skin of smoke rather than slate. I think we'll like that much better! -- Cheryl 17:44, 9 June 2007 (UTC) ::OK, it's done! You may need to use CTRL-F5 to force your browser to reload the stylesheet before you see the change. Thanks for the note on my talk page -- it's hard to keep track of conversations on so many wikis..... ;) Have a very shiny day — Catherine o' the ComTeam 17:20, 11 June 2007 (UTC) removing a page? hi cheryl, is it possible to delete any pages? i would like to consolidate all the browncoat ball information on the same page since it is a yearly event. i want to start out the "browncoat ball" page with the current info for this year's BCB, followed by the history of how it started, then followed by a list of the prior hosts. currently there are 3 browncoat ball pages: browncoat ball, 2007 browncoat ball and browncoat ball 2007 which is way too redundant and not in keeping with the article naming rules. also, do you have any listing of who is editing what? after i finish off the stuff i do know about and was involved in, i would love to continue adding information to the articles but don't want to work on gathering info on something someone is already gathering info on. thanks! vampirefan 06:02, 27 June 2007 (UTC) :Hello! I looked at the Content (A-Z) page and saw what you mean. There are actually only two pages however. Browncoat Ball 2007 and Browncoat Ball (2007) point to the same thing. The first article was moved to the new name in keeping with the Article Naming rules for events. The reason that there are two pages is that when a new event is added to the events calendar, it automatically adds a page. We weren't really sure how to handle this. Whether all information for the event (past & current info) should go on one page, or if there should be just a simple event listing for the current year, and a detailed listing in the archive for the event as a whole. Let me know your thoughts and I'll see what we can do, thanks! :Also, as for who is working on what, there are so few of us at the moment, that we don't currently have anything assigned. We sent a number of emails to the various Browncoat groups inviting them to edit their own articles, so I'd stay clear of those at least for a little while to give them an opportunity to get involved. Anything else is up for grabs. If you'd like to claim a category to edit, feel free to let us know and we'll be glad to leave it to you! -- Cheryl BC Browncoats Hey Cheryl, Thanks for your email notifying us of this great new site. Thanks also for changing the "see also" in the BC Browncoats article. I was whipping that off quickly before rushing off to a class with the intention of cleaning it up, only to discover you beat me to it. So thanks. Not sure how to use this site, but I'll check out the tutorials, etc. Will do my best to keep the BC Browncoats articles up to date. Keep flying! Serena "Join" link Hi Cheryl -- thanks for reporting the problem with the Join link. I've passed on a report to the techs so they can investigate. Sorry for the inconvenience, we'll get it sorted out as quick as we can! — Catherine o' the ComTeam 20:51, 13 June 2007 (UTC) :Thank you!! =) -- Cheryl 22:40, 13 June 2007 (UTC) ::They've removed the button for now until it's working more consistently. :) — Catherine o' the ComTeam 00:14, 16 June 2007 (UTC) More interface tools If you'd like to place a message on every page, you can edit MediaWiki:Sitenotice. This places a message with a "dismiss" link on it; once a person has dismissed it they won't see the Sitenotice again until you replace it with a new message. Show no message by placing only a "-" on the page. This can be very useful for getting messages to all users, but be cautious about using it constantly; it takes up screen space and people soon tune it out. :) You can also create a separate message for anonymous, non-logged in users at MediaWiki:Anonnotice; this overrides Sitenotice. This one can be helpful for encouraging people to log in (let them know that they can set their preferences, get smaller/more textual ads, get email notification of changes, etc.). Another place you can customize is MediaWiki:Most popular articles, which controls the display of the "most popular" items in the "top five" box at the top of the Smoke/Slate skin -- we're changing this title to "featured" as it's not currently based on page ratings (you can change the title yourself at MediaWiki:Most popular). Your community can decide how to choose what five articles are named here -- choose them yourself, put it up for a vote, let people self-promote; choose based on length and completeness, or shortness and incompleteness....whatever you feel needs the most attention from your visitors. Please let me know if there's anything else I can answer! — Catherine o' the ComTeam 00:14, 16 June 2007 (UTC) :Hi again! Looks like you might also be interested in Wikia:User:Splarka/tricks#Poor-man.27s_hit_counter -- Splarka's our resident CSS/JS wizard on the community team -- his "tricks" page has lots of good stuff (although some is specific to Monobook). Feel free to leave questions on his talk page too! :) — Catherine o' the ComTeam 05:55, 16 June 2007 (UTC) Smoke.css Wow, you're doing some amazing things with the skin! Please do be aware that this skin is still undergoing fine-tuning work by our tech/design people. It's fine for you to get a head-start on customizing this, but some of your work may end up becoming broken as parts of the design get changed, moved, or re-named -- if you're okay with that, we are too. :) It appears that the side menus are contained in a div with the class "r_boxContent", which is contained within class "roundedDiv", which apparently includes the round corners. The welcome message is in class "welcomeLoginCopy". I have not experimented at all with these myself, yet, so I will be learning along with you. A tool I highly recommend for working with CSS designs is the Firebug extension for the Firefox browser -- it has many useful features, but most helpful in your situation is the "inspect" button, which lets you hover over a page and discover not only the names, classes, and ids of various regions, but which stylesheets are affecting them. Good luck! — Catherine o' the ComTeam 19:32, 16 June 2007 (UTC) RSS feeds Headlines from NewsOfTheVerse.net http://www.newsoftheverse.net/backend/NewsOfTheVerse.rss|charset=UTF-8|date|short|max=5 Hey there; I was reading the article on News of the 'Verse and saw that they had an RSS feed, which reminded me that you might like to know about our Wikia:Help:RSS2Wiki extension which will allow you to display RSS feeds from any site on your wiki. See to the right an example of how it works -- you can do just headlines or complete news snippets. I don't know whether or where you might want to use it, but there's lots of options to play with. :) :It appears that there might be an error in the Whedonesque feed -- I couldn't get it to work here or in Feedburner. Perhaps you could contact them and see if they can fix it, or provide a straight RSS feed in addition (one ending in .rss)? — Catherine o' the ComTeam 19:16, 18 June 2007 (UTC) Youtube grZuVdS0UsY A Browncoat Anthem This also reminded me that we can display Youtube videos too -- see Wikia:Help:Youtube for syntax. Also, is there a better place for me to communicate these ideas and features to you guys? I don't mean to aim comments just at you, as Sheribeth and others are doing a lot of great work here too. I couldn't see that you had established a central talking place, such as Talk:Main Page, a Community Portal, the Forums or anything else akin to the "village pump" at Wikipedia. There's no one right way to do that, but let me know if I should be posting elsewhere. :) Have fun! — Catherine o' the ComTeam 17:02, 18 June 2007 (UTC) Entertainment footer Hi Cheryl -- I'm working on a project for Wikia to help link the science-fiction wikis together, and encourage people to see this as one big site, rather than a lot of little wikis. I'd like to post this footer at the bottom of the main page. The gaming wikis have started a similar project, and they've seen a lot more cross-traffic. Would it be okay to post this at the bottom of the main page here? You could also feel free to edit it, to fit in better with this community. -- Danny (talk) 20:17, 17 September 2007 (UTC) :Absolutely! I think it's a fantastic idea and you're more than welcome to add it to the main page here. Sorry it took me so long to reply, and thanks for asking! Browncoat - Cheryl (talk) 03:39, 22 September 2007 (UTC)